Adobe "Animals" (2013) :30 (U.S.A.)

Goodby created this commercial for Adobe, which aired the day after the Superbowl. The idea was to get past the Super Bowl hype and use real metrics to measure the success.

the monkey says "can you believe they spend millions of dollars on these things for what, 30 seconds? It's way cheaper to run it online. then they'll know who sees it, and whether it works.

While I love the idea of using the Super Bowl clichés (talking animals anyone?) the ad is a wee bit flawed in its logic.

Last night's Super Bowl was the most watched event in history. We're talking 111.3 million viewers. So while we can't say every last person saw the the Clydesdale spot, last night, a lot of people must have, because the "official,' youtube channel from Budweiser shows the spot having close to 6.4 million hits as of Monday late morning PST.

Since no one saw Adobe's spot last night, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the next day it only has 23,169 views.

Advertising Agency
Goodby Silverstein & Partners

Creative
Rich Silverstein - Co-Chairman, Creative Director
Keith Anderson - Creative Director
Shane Fleming - Art Director
Steve Nathans - Copywriter

Production
Cindy Fluitt - Director of Broadcast Production
Cindy Epps - Producer

Account
Robert Riccardi - Managing Partner
Angie Ziebell - Account Director
Joel Giullian - Account Director
VJ Varoon Jain – Account Manager

Strategy
John Thorpe – Group Brand Strategy Director
Molly Cabe – Senior Brand Strategist

Media
Dong Kim- Group Communication Strategy Director
Sarah Alwen- Sr. Communication Strategist

Production Company
Tool of North America
Director- Tom Routson

Editorial
Barbary Post
435 Pacific Avenue, Suite 300
San Francisco, California, 94133

Visual Effects
Brickyard
2054 Broadway
Santa Monica, CA 90404

Adland® is supported by your donations alone. You can help us out by buying us a Ko-Fi coffee.
Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
comment_node_story
Files must be less than 1 MB.
Allowed file types: jpg jpeg gif png wav avi mpeg mpg mov rm flv wmv 3gp mp4 m4v.
Cocoa's picture

You assume that number of views or hits is an accurate measure of an ad's effectiveness, which is of course wrong. That's the point the Adobe ad was trying to make, which was obviously lost on you.

Sure, millions of people saw the Clydesdale spot. But how many of them bought Budweiser beer as a result of seeing it? Impossible to know.

Since the Adobe ad ran online, it's effectiveness is capable of being measured.

kidsleepy's picture

I am fully aware of the ad's point. I am fully aware that people who use Adobe watch the Super Bowl, too.

I am fully aware that the more people who see your ad, the greater chances of your ad being remembered. In other words, I am fully aware of math. Specifically probability and logic.

If, say, 111.3 million viewers saw that ad on the super bowl, and 2% of them were adobe users, that number would be 2,226,000.
Whereas today, February 17th, a full 18 days after it was posted on Adobe's official youtube channels, the Animal spot has 159,560 hits.
2% of 159,560 is roughly 3,192. Even if every last person in that 2% bought an adobe product, it still does not come near the probability (measured or otherwise) that more people would have bought Adobe if more people would have seen it.

Here's another way of thinking about it. if you trust the measurements so much, and if you trust the targeted advertising so much, why did we have to receive an article telling us about it? Why was there so much PR around it? Why did you have to do double the work? First to inform me the spot is out there, and then to make me watch it? Especially when it's on Youtube, essentially the dumping ground for all spots, now?

Oh and here's something else I'm fully aware of: We watched the spot because we write for this ad site and work in advertising for a living. The majority of people-- targeted or not--d o not like ads. So much so that other people are developing apps and devices that will one day soon block all your online ads.

How will you measure it then?